Science & Society

The humanities are considered the least discriminatory academic discipline - known cases of discrimination do not reach statistical significance - but women and minorities are still collectively ignored at 1.4 times the rate of Caucasian males when seeking guidance about their futures. A new paper says the problem is endemic across all fields. Faced with requests to meet with potential doctoral students of easily identifiable gender, race or ethnicity, faculty in almost every academic discipline are significantly more responsive to white males than to women and minorities. So if you want a…

To modern cultural sensibilities, "Victorian" means 'repressed' because it seemed overly formal to people that want to wear flip-flops into the office, yet they clearly got some things right.(1) The name derives from the reign of Queen Victoria in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century, a time when England ruled the western world culturally and every region militarily. The Victorian Era brought with it with the creation of a paid police force(2) rather than the local constable system that had been around since the Tudors. (3) Source: University of Liverpool  The…

Having once lived in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, on occasion I would drive to those old gigantic relics of steel mills. They were behemoths and so were the buildings that housed them. They looked like they could block out the sun. In John Ford's "The Quiet Man", a native of Ireland asked John Wayne's character what they feed men in Pittsburgh that makes them so big and Wayne replied, "Steel, and pig-iron furnaces so hot a man forgets his fear of hell". In the early 1950s it was a job for hard men. In America, I used to say, "You won't be somebody unless you manufacture something" and…

The knock on ACSH comes primarily from partisan groups like Mother Jones. A disgruntled employee who thought he should run the company quit and took their donor list and Mother Jones crafted a causalation paper saying that they were being paid to be shills. See, they wrote about this and a company in that business gave them money. Science 2.0 has a lot more traffic than ACSH and I have never had anyone call me up and tell me they will pay money if we write about some cancer-causing death product, so that doesn't pass the smell test. A corporate toadie who is an intellectual shill for…

In December 2011, when the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Texas Rangers signed away their local television rights for about $3 billion apiece, the sport media heralded a new record for local television rights fees. Accounting for roughly 43 percent of MLB’s $8 billion haul in 2014, media revenues have made the players rich and the owners even richer. Today, the idea that a team would ban its games from being broadcast is unthinkable, so ingrained are TV and radio contracts in the marketing and business practices of the sport. But in 1921, when radios first began making their way into…

Rolling Stone’s retraction of an incendiary article about an alleged gang rape on the campus of the University of Virginia certainly deserves a place in the pantheon of legendary journalism screw-ups. It is highly unusual – although not unprecedented – for a news organization to air its dirty laundry so publicly. One meme that’s emerged from the wreckage is that journalism ought to be more like science, which, it’s thought, is the epitome of a self-correcting system. In a story about the Rolling Stone retraction, for example, the New York Times reported that Nicholas Lemann, former dean of…

Science is considered a source of truth and the importance of its role in shaping modern society cannot be overstated. But in recent years science has entered a crisis of trust. The results of many scientific experiments appear to be surprisingly hard to reproduce, while mistakes have highlighted flaws in the peer review system. This has hit scientific credibility and prompted researchers to create new measures in order to maintain the quality of academic research and its findings. Credibility crisis This is particularly relevant in the UK, whose government prides itself on science-driven…

Japan is famous for committing suicide - as many people kill themselves using rope as Americans, with a much larger population, do with guns - but they may have more accurate numbers than western countries, according to a new paper.  In western countries, suicide or accident is determined by a coroner. When it's a drug overdose versus a suicide is subjective, only guns are sure to be consistently implicated in a suicide, because gun control is part of a control war, where no one is quite sure what to make of drugs. In the UK, most guns are banned so suicide or accident is even more…

A new study notes that many breastfeeding mothers in the Philippines want more sex right after giving birth than they did before they became pregnant. The Philippines culture has a low divorce rate so is it a relationship survival strategy? Or an increased sex drive? A range of surveys of women in Western societies and how they experience the first six weeks after giving birth show that they tend to devote more time to their offspring's well-being than to their partner. This can lead to lower relationship satisfaction and less intercourse between partners, and a clear shift from so-called…

Though girls at a young age enjoy Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), by the time they graduate from college their interests have changed. Women still prefer the life sciences and dominate the social sciences, but in other areas like physics the representation is not the same as the broad population. Engineering, which has the highest equality in pay between genders, still lags in women despite their efforts to recruit more females. A team of psychologists report on an intervention for college undergraduates which found that female first-year students participate more actively…